In an effort to make the web more “discoverable,” Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber announced on Thursday the Google rival to Wikipedia – called “knol.” A knol – or unit of knowledge in Googlespeak – will be written by users with “authorative knowledge” on the subject.
The key idea is to highlight authors who otherwise wouldn’t get props. As Manber puts it, “Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.”
We have to wonder what this will mean for Google’s elusive algorithms, considering Manber was shameless in saying, “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” (read: anything that gets posted by us will be at the top of the results, so deal with it Wikipedia.)
A full screen shot and more on knols (which my blog writer won’t stop changing to ‘knolls,’ Damn you and your alternative spellings!) is available at Google’s prod dev blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html
